I’ve noticed that it’s almost always a bad omen when an Indie game is referred to as “ambitious” before release. It’s like an industry code word for “the small developer team bit off way more than they can chew, have run out of money and have therefore been forced to release in a completely broken and unfinished state in Early Access”.

I recently had a bit of a reckoning about my writing. It wasn’t the first and it won’t the last. This reckoning centred around a trend within my writings of referring to people with addictions with derogatory terms such as “pissheads”, “bagheads”, “crackheads” and other nasty, judgemental epithets. I wish I could say that this is something I left in the past but I drafted a piece yesterday about alcoholism, addiction and the Easter weekend that used those terms for all their distancing and dehumanising effect....

I’ve always been a big fan of Bowie’s music but have been somewhat ambivalent about a lot of the other stuff: the fashion, the personas, all the sketchy stuff he got into in his nose-candy years. So, as amazing as the old V&A show looked a few years back, I wasn’t that gutted to have missed it. My relationship with the great man had always been more of an eardrums thing than an eyeballs thing....

why does this site look like the BBC Micro game Granny’s Garden but without the charming pixel art? I’ve always been attracted to some retro aesthetics with my online stuff and normally can’t resist a good typewriter font. This is probably because I started out as a serious writer with a typewriter and I often get nostalgic about those early days and the creative frenzies that accompanied them. I’ve always been attracted to some retro aesthetics with my online stuff and normally can’t resist a good typewriter font....

Hello, this is the notes section for my website, though it also functions as a kind of website within itself, hence the separate url. This is a home for all the posts that might not make the main section, sometimes because they are social media posts and other times becase they’re first drafts or fragments. They will run the gamut from microblogging to poems and early drafts and anything else of a more ephemeral nature....

30/1/2014 It’s been an interesting couple of days since I posted my Remembering the Death of Performance Poetry blog. On the whole the response on Facebook and Twitter — while far from a solemn parade of nodding heads — has been enthusiastic, thoughtful and similarly reflective. People have chipped in with curious questions about whether there is a difference between Performance Poetry and Spoken Word and others have added their own commentary, stories and opinions on how live literature has transformed, fluctuated and stagnated over the last couple of decades....

DON’T PANIC!!! Apologies in advance for the alarmist title. This post is not about some imminent collapse in the Spoken Word boom, far from it. It is intended as a meditative look back at the cycles that happen within spoken word cultures and how history tends to repeat itself, especially when there’s no history available to learn from. It centres around a certain historical point within the poetry scenes in the UK....